The Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook-- Perhaps my Favourite Church

Today I went to Sunday Vigil Mass in the Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook. I'm falling in love with this church, despite having visited it for the first time many years ago.

A few years ago I started a series of blog on Dublin churches, and I included this church in it. I actually stopped that series because I had a few whingy comments (not from regulars) about the modern churches I featured. Personally, I'm very fond of many sixties and post-sixties churches, and I think the inability to see anything good in them is a form of philistinism, a lack of imagination. Ugliness is just ugliness, but there are different sorts of beauty.

Funnily enough, it was the post on the Sacred Heart where I announced my intention to end the series.

Plainness has generally been the thing that has pleased me the most about churches, so now I'm surprised to be falling under the enchantment of a more ornate church. Actually, the marble altarpiece is one of my favourite things about the Sacred Heart. But my absolute favourite thing about it is the very finely-detailed gold ornamentation on the walls behind the altar, and in other places. I also like the marble pillars. The profusion of little detail greatly pleases me, but it never becomes overwhelming or gaudy or heavy.

Churches that appeal to me nearly always do so because they have an atmosphere I can only describe as "spacey"-- transcendent, otherworldly, outside of time. This one seems very spacey to me.

It was deliberately built on the location of the old Donnybrook Fair, an event which became notorious for its drunkenness and fighting, giving rise to the term "donnybrook". I like the historical transposition of that, the palimpsest quality. Perhaps all that was good about the Donnybrook Fair is redeemed and sublimated in this sacred space.

(Anticipating a potential "nobody goes to the Ordinary Form" reaction to my pictures-- no, I'm not being paranoid, yes, I have had this reaction before-- I should mention that I took the pictures long before Mass began. There was a good congregation.)